Asghar Farhadi's the Past from a Postmofernist Perspective
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IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL) ISSN(E): 2321-8878; ISSN(P): 2347-4564 Vol. 3, Issue 1, Jan 2015, 27-32 © Impact Journals ASGHAR FARHADI’S THE PAST FROM A POSTMODERNIST PERSPECTIVE SINA TAVASSOLI Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India ABSTRACT The Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, has contributed to national cinema of Iran which is indicative of people with a rich cultural and socio-political history. The iconography of Iranian cinema represents a thought provoking portrait of socio-ethical backdrop. Farhadi’s fame is indebted to his universal film A Separation which won the best academy award 2012. One year later, he directed The Past which nominated for 2013 the best foreign film in Cannes film festival. The Past, is an intricate drama which portraits the nostalgia for the lost wholeness of the past. This film tries to indicate that how man tries to justify his past that is stemmed from disappointment and failure by incorrect choices in life. By borrowing insights from Lyotard’s question of postmodernism, this paper attempts to study the working of postmodernism’s characteristics in Asghar Farhadi’s The Past . This paper concludes that all those features and characteristics of postmodern features together have been the real key to the sense of relativism in terms of recognition, truth, narrations, and culture on the cornerstone which postmodernism is built upon. KEYWORDS: Iran’s Cinema, Asghar Farhadi, The Past, Postmodernism, Relativism INTRODUCTION Iranian cinema sometimes seems to draw more from documentaries and poetry than conventional narrative sources. Farhadi’s plots, with their chains of consequences and flawed characters, often suggest the influence of European dramatists such as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, whose work he has directed for the stage. Before breaking out with his Golden Globe and Oscar-winning marital drama A Separation , Asghar Farhadi was already the director of four previous films that offer an equally acute, perceptive gaze into the realities of contemporary domestic life in Iran, from the margins of the working class to the relative comforts of the bourgeoisie. Saeed Dehghan on his review for The Guardian states, “Asghar Farhadi has proved able to make good films – and even obtain the government approval as well as international admiration after winning the Golden Bear.” Farhadi’s style is unique, and he has a microscopic vision on everything. Dave Calhoun, a film critic, explains about Farhadi’s style, says, “He employs an unadorned realism to tease quiet, important themes from in-the-moment stories. That same style is very much present in his first French film, The Past , a story of a Parisian family in emotional flux and touched by tragedy. When an interviewer, Mary Kaye Schilling, asks Farhadi that how he has come up with the idea for The Past , he says, “I heard a story about a man who was going back to a woman after many years, to live under the same roof in order to get a divorce. It stayed with me and I finally realized that in order to get rid of it, I’d have to make it into a film. From there, I have to ask myself why he left four years ago, what is going to happen here? The process of writing is like creating a game of dominoes: The first domino creates the second incident, and so forth until the end.” Tina Impact Factor(JCC): 1.3648 - This article can be downloaded from www.impactjournals.us 28 Sina Tavassoli Hassannia in her book, Asghar farhadi: Life and Cinema, shed light on Farhadi cinematography by saying that he is a modern and real dramatist. It means that he has learned from major dramatists of the twentieth century and turned his gained knowledge into plots which are presenting morality in acute and deftly manner. Accordingly, Farhadi is able to create stories which are identical with Iranian culture and at the same time they are universal. Above all, he shows what are the motives and logic hidden behind man’s action and reaction. He never tries to compel the spectators to decide whether the action is true or justified, but he tries to emphasize on the action and decision occurred in the specific moment (15). In The Past Marie (Bérénice Bejo) has asked Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) to return to Paris from Teheran after some years, to be present for the long-delayed and contentious divorce. He is not legally required to be there, but Marie wants closure, to bid a civilized farewell to their failed marriage, and also for him to say a considerate goodbye to her children. But on his arrival he notices many changes. Ahmad finds out that Marie has not booked him a hotel, but for complex and unexamined motives expects him to stay in her small, chaotic house, putting him right in the middle of her current difficulties. Ahmad learns that Marie has started a new life with her live-in partner, Samir (Tahar Rahim), who has moved in with his little boy, Fouad (Elyes Aguis) whose wife is in a coma. Marie tries to involve Ahmad in domestic issues and asks him to discover about her daughter’s isolation, Lucie ( Pauline Burlet ), who is not happy with Marie’s intended third marriage. Perspective of Iranian Cinema The pioneers of the Iranian New Wave were directors like Forough Farrokhzad and Khosrow Sinai. They made innovative art films with highly political and philosophical tones and poetic language. Subsequent films of this type have become known as the New Iranian cinema to distinguish them from their earlier roots. The most notable figures of the Iranian New Wave are Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Bahram Beizai, Darius Mehrjui, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Iranian New Wave films shared some characteristics with the European art films of the period, in particular Italian Neo-realism. Parallel to the Iranian New Wave, with its neorealist and minimalist art cinema, there exists a so-called "popular art cinema" in Iran. Filmmakers who belong to this circle make films with a broader range of audience than the narrow spectrum of highly educated people who admire the ‘New Wave’, but believe that their movies are also artistically sound. Filmmakers such as Nasser Taghvaee and Ali Hatami are the best examples of this cinematic movement. Ziba Mir-Hosseini explains about circumstances of Iranian cinema in pre-and-post revolution, says “Before the 1979 revolution, the priests in Iran rejected cinema, or at best ignored it. Films were among the forms of art considered forbidden, and going to cinema was supposed as committing sin.. The post-revolution cinema was thus faced with a dilemma. Aware of cinema's power, the Islamic authorities could neither reject nor ignore the medium as the priests had done before. On the other hand, jurisprudence had nothing to say about film, apart from imposing its rules of halal and haram on cinematic images and themes. New government made a concerted attempt to bring cinema under the domination of state ideology and subject it to a process of Islamization. But the Islamization process has failed, as filmmakers, like other artists, have gradually managed to free their art from jurisprudence injunctions and state ideology” (26-27). Ultimately, there was a kind of reconciliation between the state and Iranian filmmakers in order to continue cinematic art under the interest of the state. Filmmakers knew the state red lines and they tried to address and tackle the concerned themes metaphorically. Index Copernicus Value: 3.0 - Articles can be sent to [email protected] Asghar Farhadi’s the Past from a Postmodernist Perspective 29 Hamid Dabashi in his book Close Up: Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future argues that the power of cinema has proceeded that of literature in that it has become an international art, with wide global viewing. Accordingly the Iranian cinema is so powerful because Iranians have watched and assimilated the world through film. Now the cinema is reflecting back to the world what it has seen, adding its own cultural color. Additionally its power stems from the fact that the world had made up its mind about Iran through images and news reports following the revolution, and was therefore perhaps a little surprised by what it saw on the screen. Dabashi goes further to say: “In the cinema we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us” (175). In a sense cinema is a glimpse into the hopes and desires of a nation. Therefore, the cinematic devices pioneered, partly due to censorship at first, have sharpened the filmmakers of the New Iranian Cinema to produce a stream of innovative, incredibly rich and symbolic national cinema indicative of a people with a rich cultural, socio-political and artistic history. DISCUSSIONS Gonarkar and Dhage in the paper on “Postmodernism and Film” state that, “Postmodernism, as a discursive stylistic grid has enriched film theory and its analysis by calling attention to a stylistic shift toward a media conscious cinema” (520). Much of the work on postmodernism in film has the feature of post-modernity and the symbol of a postmodern aesthetic. Some consider postmodernism as the continuation of modernism and some see it as a breaking part of modern period. According to Lyotard, both modernism and post modernism exist by shattering the tradition. Postmodernism is defined according to Lyotard as taking the rules of modernism and using them as guidelines for postmodernism . Most of Lyotard’s theory can be summed with one quotation which states, “A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or the work.